by Kōbō Abe
The insect dealer followed up my words swiftly in a gravelly voice. “That’s right. Just having this much space at your disposal is worth an incredible sum. After all, Japan is a tiny country suffering from absolute space deficiency.”
Was that big skull of his stuffed with bean curd instead of brains, or did he talk like an asshole on purpose?
“Don’t get me wrong,” said the shill. “It’s not only the pillow I’m worried about.” There must have been something catching about the insect dealer’s rapid-fire, hoarse way of talking, for now the shill rattled on in the same way. “There are some pills I’ve been taking, and a book I’m halfway through—after all, we’ve got to get our things and move in, don’t we? But I won’t come back empty-handed, Captain. Will you let me sell some of those passkeys for you? I’ll bring you back some absolutely first-rate people. The kind that think fast and are flexible. This cave has all sorts of possibilities, after all. Right off the top of my head I can think of farm-produce storage, lacquerware factories (they need plenty of moisture), mushroom cultivation, the brewing industry … you name it.”
“Haven’t you got the message yet?” I said. “I don’t want people finding out about this place.”
“I know. What you’re really after is a way to work without paying taxes, am I right? Leave it to me, I’m an expert. For instance, you could form a film studio to make porn videos. They say that really rakes it in. Or you might consider running an underground hotel as a hideout for escaped criminals. You wouldn’t have to spend much on facilities, and you could charge as much as you liked. Even better would be intensive-care rooms for mental hospitals. A mental hospital is really a kind of prison for lifers, so what with local citizens’ protests and one thing and another, finding somewhere to build can be a problem. But once you have that, you’ve got the goose that lays the golden egg. Patients in lifetime isolation wards.”
The man was totally uncomprehending. But how could I explain the need for an ark to a cancer victim with only six months to live? Even if he had no inkling of his condition, persuading him would be a vain effort, one I could not bring myself to make. Yet I couldn’t very well let him do as he pleased, either. I was saddled with one heck of a nuisance.
Finally the trickle of water stopped, and the roar of the flushing toilet echoed in the air.
“No need to make a special trip,” I said. “The weather’s bad … . Go ahead and let me know if there’s anything you need, and I’ll do my best to get it or approximate it.”
“Right, you can always make do for a pillow.” As if to say he had everything figured out, the insect dealer began drumming his fingers on the edge of the cup he had chosen, a look of sangfroid on his face. “Even if it’s borrowed, if you wrap it in a dirty undershirt of your own it comes to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
10
THE SHILL DISAPPEARS AND A
BOTTOM-SLAPPING RITUAL TAKES PLACE
Perhaps because of having had to wait to go to the toilet, the shill descended the stairs in a sort of fox-trot, his knees pressed together.
“I’m hungry,” murmured the insect dealer, eyes turned vaguely on the spot just vacated by the shill. “By the way, Captain,” he went on, “how do you manage to support yourself here?”
I could well understand the motive of his question. His was an entirely natural curiosity: the world over, a man’s source of income is the measure of his worth. Even so, I had no obligation to reply, and no intention of doing so, either. As a matter of fact, the electricity was all stolen, as were most of the fittings, which came from the city hall. There was no law that said I had to let him know my weakest points. I pretended not to hear.
Light footsteps approached, as those of the shill faded away; there remained less than ten seconds, I calculated, before she set foot on the top stair.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have forced him to stay.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re the captain. Just follow your instincts.”
“I heard he’s got cancer.”
“No!”
“She told me. Keep it quiet—he doesn’t know.”
“Kind of ironic—the guy’s so much like a cancer himself.”
We laughed loudly and freely in a burst of mutual understanding. Then the girl appeared, coffeepot in hand. I was unable to look her square in the face. The echo of that gush, still fresh in my ears, made me picture not her face but the outlet for urine.
She joined easily in our laughter, then announced gaily, “Guess what I found out! The refrigerator’s stuffed full of canned beer!”
“For shame,” scolded the insect dealer, pulling on the armrests of the chaise longue to bring his body forward. “You’re forgetting yourself, miss. You can’t let yourself come that far under the president’s influence.”
Intuitively I sensed he was referring to the shill.
“President?” I queried. “Of what? Who?”
“You needn’t sound so impressed,” said the insect dealer. “These days everybody and his brother is a company president. The neighborhood junkman walks around with a namecard that says ‘President of Eastern Reclamation, Inc.’”
“Still, what kind of a company is it?”
The girl smiled, lips open and teeth closed. “It’s called Saisai.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s written with the characters for ‘hold’—as in a function or event—and ‘festival.’ ”
“Peculiar sort of name.”
“He represents festival stall owners.” The insect dealer waved his right hand as if flicking away imaginary dust, and adjusted his glasses with his left. To the woman he said, “Anyway, don’t forget that without the captain’s permission you’re not entitled to a glass of water, let alone a can of beer. First you go and put on some phony act about a fractured ankle, now this. Try to show a little more sense.”
His preachy tone of voice was far phonier than her act had been. She nodded, and for no reason I found myself feeling abashed.
“Don’t exaggerate,” I said. “All I’ve been saying is there’s a need for caution about boarding procedures. The beer doesn’t worry me.”
A fat lot it didn’t. I like to drink my beer all alone. I’m a beer hog—a beeraholic, in fact, who breaks into a sweat at just the sound of the word. What’s more, I like my beer with a little chocolate on the side. Every day, once a day, I sip a leisurely can of beer and munch on chocolates. It is a time of supreme piggish delight, a time I could share with no one.
“You don’t mind, really?” Behind their thick concave lenses, the insect dealer’s questioning eyes widened in happy excitement. “Coffee before a meal is bad for the stomach, anyway. Shall we presume on the captain’s generosity this once? Let’s celebrate our embarkation—that’s as good an excuse as any.”
It was a sensation I’d often experienced in dreams—losing my footing on a hill of garbage. In trying to recover lost ground, I made yet another concession.
“Very well, let’s drink to that,” I said. “But maybe beer alone isn’t enough.” I could hardly suggest chocolate as an accompaniment—although when you try it with an open mind, the hops and cacao blend together in a bitter harmony that I find irresistible. “How about some canned sardines?”
“Excellent,” said the insect dealer. “They’re very good for you. Sardines have lots of a nutrient called prostaglandin, which makes them effective against all kinds of diseases. Hardening of the arteries, even cancer.”
The idiot. What did he have to go and say that for? But then, I was the one who had spilled the beans to him, so what could I say? Luckily, her expression didn’t flicker. Turning toward the hold, she called down:
“When you’re finished down there, we’re having beer and sardines up here.”
Not to be outdone, I too called down. “The sardines are in a basket on top of the refrigerator.”
No answer. I felt an unpleasant presentiment.
She set the coffeepot on the table and smiled.
“So the coffee turned out to be a waste.”
“No—I’ll have some,” I said. “Westerners drink coffee and alcohol together and think nothing of it, I’ve heard. Somehow it protects the liver.”
She poured out a cupful. Still not a sound from the hold. It was time we heard something; since the point of emission is higher in the male than the female, the noise ought to be correspondingly louder.
“Where’s the sugar?”
“Let me think.” I take both tea and coffee without sugar, so I couldn’t recall immediately where I did keep it. I had a feeling it might be in a jar in the back of the refrigerator, where ants wouldn’t get into it. It would probably be better to have the shill look for it while I gave instructions. I went around the table, into the interstice where the bookcase and the parapet came together at a sharp angle, and looked down into the hold. The shill was nowhere to be seen.
The meaning of the scene before my eyes temporarily eluded me. It was a clean-cut oblong room, solid stone, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to search. I felt the frustration of someone looking through the viewfinder of a broken stereoscope. I was used to seeing no one there, but how could I get used to not seeing someone who should be there?
“Now where did he roam off to?” I muttered.
The girl came around from the other side of the table and joined me at the parapet. “Is he gone?” she asked. She didn’t seem particularly concerned; in fact, she sounded rather intrigued. Not knowing the lack of places to hide would doubtless take away the peculiarity of the situation. Coffee cup in hand, the insect dealer joined us.
“Over there behind the storage drums, in the shadows,” he said, slurping his coffee, and called, “All right, let’s not be cute. We all know you’re not so squeamish you can’t go right out in the open there. Come on out.”
“They’re lined up smack against the wall,” I said. “There’s no way anybody could squeeze in there.”
I realized what had happened. I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew where the shill must have gone. From the bridge it was hard to see, but he must have crawled through the passageway cut into the far side of that same wall. Unless he had chopped himself up and flushed himself down the toilet, there was simply no other exit.
The girl called out, her voice trailing off in a long sinuous echo like the rise and fall of waves on a large, shallow strand. “If you want to play hide-and-seek, wait till we decide who’s it.”
I strained my ears, listening for a scream. He could not possibly get through that passageway on his own. I had set up a trap on the principle of the bow. It was triggered by a line of fishing gut stretched half an inch off the ground, which when touched would release a steel leaf spring. The basic purpose was to keep rats out, but it could easily shatter a person’s ankle.
“The bastard—he got away.” The insect dealer followed my line of vision and instantly grasped what had happened. He leaned over the parapet, trying to peer down the passageway. “What’s down there, at the end of that tunnel?”
Had these been the crew members I’d anticipated for so long, there would’ve been no need to ask. That would have been the first place I’d have shown them: the heart of the ark, where tunnels branch off three ways, one to each of the other two holds, and one back here. If each hold were a residential area, the “heart” was in the best location for communal use, so mentally I always referred to it as the “central hold” or “work hold.” It was my firm intention to interfere as little as possible in the crew’s personal lives, but some tasks, like the operation of air-purifying equipment or electric generators, required a joint effort. The success or failure of life aboard the ark hinged on how well people cooperated. If everyone lived like the eupcaccia, there would be no problem, since if no one had any urge to expand his or her territory, there would be no fear of mutual territorial violations. Letting the shill aboard might have been as fatal a lapse as if I had overlooked shipworms.
“Machinery.” My voice sounded too belligerent. More graciously, I added, “I’ll take you there one of these times.”
“What kind of machinery?”
“Machinery for survival, of course.”
“Survival of what?” asked the girl, at last seeming to grasp the situation. Bending her body at a right angle, she rested her weight on the parapet and leaned forward as far as she could. Her skirt of artificial leather was stretched to the limit, revealing her round contours like a second skin. The reality of those two soft globes right there beside my own hips seemed more fanciful than my wildest fancies. My brain began to turn red and raw, as if peeling.
“Survival of what?” she repeated. What indeed, I wondered. If only she had asked not “of what,” but “why.” For if it was possible for me to go on living near a skirt stretched this tightly, over this round a pair of hips, then I had no doubts whatever concerning the meaning of survival. Even the eupcaccia emerged from its chrysalis in preparation for mating. Emergence is a preparation for rebirth—regeneration—as well as for death. Looking sideways at her round, tight skirt, I thought that perhaps I too was starting to emerge from my cocoon.
“Of course survival for its own sake is meaningless. It’s pointless to live a life not worth living.” My answer was no answer. The insect dealer then spoke up in my place.
“Don’t you ever think about nuclear war or things like that?” he asked her.
“It doesn’t interest me. Even on TV, if it’s anything about war I change the channel.”
“That’s a woman for you,” said the insect dealer, turning his back to the hold and settling against the parapet until he was at the optimal distance for viewing her hips (about ten inches away). “Women are born without any imagination.”
Hardly a sensitive remark. Instinctively I came to her defense. “Look who’s talking. You can’t stand barking dogs, can you?”
“No, but so what?”
The girl purposely made light of it. “The reason women don’t think ahead is because they have to go to the supermarket every day. This coffee is too bitter for me. I don’t like it without sugar.”
“No?” I said. “But it’s better this way if we’re going to have beer next, isn’t it?”
The insect dealer gulped the remainder of his coffee with a noise like the pump of a dry well, never ceasing his close observation of her rump. Seemingly conscious of his eyes, she waved her hand now and then as if to chase off a pesky fly. But her right-angled posture remained the same, needlessly provocative.
“Let’s go downstairs and see what we can see,” I said, motioning to her, my real aim being to get her away from the insect dealer. “If he’s injured, it’ll mean trouble.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” she said. “That man is as sharp as they come. He can catch flies in his bare hands.”
“So can I.”
“While they’re flying.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about him,” said the insect dealer. He laughed sharply and gave the woman’s bottom a slap, making a startlingly loud noise. In monkey colonies, what did they call it? Oh, yes—mounting: the losing monkey sticks out its rear end. Subjugation begins with control of the other’s hindquarters. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already dead. I don’t know what sort of trap it was, but if he’d only hurt himself a little, he’d be screaming for help by now.”
Despite the liberty the insect dealer took with her bottom, the girl reacted only by twisting away and jerking her head. Had she fallen so easily under his sway? Or was she used to this sort of thing? Perhaps it was not as serious as I’d assumed. I wanted to follow his example, but something held me back.
“I doubt if his life could be in danger,” I said, “but it is pitch dark in there.”
“He took a light,” said the insect dealer. “Remember that one hanging from the locker handle—the kind coal miners wear on their heads.”
His statements lacked consistency. First he exaggerated the danger the shill was in, then in the next breath he emphasized how safe he was.
He was just out to find fault with whatever I said. She sided with him.
“That’s right, it’s a waste of time worrying about him—he’s sharp as a tack,” she said, and casually shifted her weight from the left leg to the right; in the process the two globes, still pressed close together, subtly changed shape. The skirt stuck to her bottom, becoming progressively more transparent.
I wasn’t seriously concerned about the shill’s well-being myself; I only wanted to put a fast stop to this unpleasant collusion between the insect dealer and her. Besides, it was barely possible that he had gotten safely past the trap and entered the work hold. I was unwilling to credit him with as much cunning and dexterity as she, but perhaps something—a rat, say—had tripped the mechanism beforehand.
I could not have people roaming all over the ship, in any case. The air-conditioning system and electrical generator were as yet unfinished, and I couldn’t permit anyone to lay hands on them in my absence. I especially did not want him, or anyone, getting into the magazine, where locked in a safe I had five crossbows, seven model guns, and one rifle rebuilt with steel-reinforced barrel and hammer. I had test-fired each one five successive times with no difficulty. I was damned if I’d let the shill get his hands on those.